Now that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is streaming on HBO Max, you’re officially out of excuses. Watch this anxiety-inducing, darkly funny drama ASAP, and join me in my quest to get Rose Byrne her first-ever Oscar win.
Written and directed by Mary Bronstein (previously best known for her 2008 indie comedy Yeast), If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stars Byrne as a mom caring for a sick child, by herself, who is slowly but surely losing her mind. Also starring Conan O’Brien as Linda’s long-suffering therapist, and ASAP Rocky as a guest at the motel where Linda stays, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a stylish fever dream of maternal stress. The film received rave reviews from critics, but hasn’t picked up as many accolades this award season as some expected. Thankfully, Byrne did get nominated for Best Actress at the 2026 Oscars, and she absolutely deserves to win.
Now that the movie is streaming on HBO Max, many more people will be watching. While some of the movie is fairly straight-forward, other parts are more abstract and existential. If you got lost along the way, don’t worry, because Decider is here to help. Read on for an analysis of the If I Had Legs I’d Kick You plot summary and the If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ending explained, including the f I Had Legs I’d Kick You meaning.
Photo: Everett Collection
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You plot summary:
Linda (Byrne), is a stressed out mother tasked with caring for her severely ill daughter, who is hooked up to a feeding tube. While we aren’t sure what, exactly, is wrong with her daughter—and indeed, don’t even see daughter’s face, only hear her voice off screen—we know that she needs to gain a certain amount of weight to come off the tube. Linda is desperate to get her daughter off the tube so she can return to a semblance of normal life, but unfortunately her daughter is an extremely picky eater.
Linda’s husband Charles (Christian Slater), a ship captain, is away on an eight-week work trip, leaving Linda to care for their sick kid on her own, on top of her full-time job as a therapist. To make matters worse, the ceiling in her house bursts a huge whole, thanks to a leak, and forcing Linda and her daughter to stay at a seedy motel. That means Linda now shares a room with her daughter and her daughter’s incessantly beeping feeding machine, preventing her from getting any sleep.
Linda spends her sleepless nights—the only time she gets a moment for herself—drinking wine, eating candy, smoking weed, and listening to music. She takes longer and longer walks away from the hotel, far enough away that the baby monitor she carries with her to listen in on her daughter disconnects. She visits her house and discovers no progress has been made on the ceiling repairs, despite the fact that her husband told her he hired guys who would take care of it quickly. When she calls her husband to complain about this, and about the fact that she’s slowly losing it, he offers no sympathy or support.
Photo: Logan White /© A24 /Courtesy Everett Collection
Instead, Linda vents to her therapist and colleague, played by Conan O’Brien, who also offers little sympathy. As a therapist herself, Linda is barely keeping it together for her clients, including another stressed-out mother named Caroline, who abandons her newborn with Linda mid-session. Caroline’s husband refuses to leave work to come get the baby, and her own therapist refuses to help her, forcing Linda to call the police to report Caroline as missing and the baby as abandoned.
Meanwhile, Linda’s daughter continues not to eat enough and Linda continues not to sleep. Linda becomes friendly with one of the motel workers named James (A$AP Rocky), and takes him to her house to examine the hole in the ceiling. While there, gazing into the hole, Linda experiences a traumatic flashback of a time in the hospital when nurses were pinning down her screaming daughter, presumably to put the feeding tube in. She’s pulled out of this flashback when James leans too far over and falls through the hole to the floor below, breaking his leg. Linda calls him an ambulance, but leaves before it arrives.
Linda obsesses over Andrea Yates, a real-life woman who confessed to drowning her five children in a bathtub in 2001. She confesses that she is trying so hard not to be her. Linda asks everyone around her for help—the treatment center where her daughter is going, her husband, her therapist—but no one will help her. Her therapist goes so far as to drop her as a patient, for her crossing professional boundaries. Linda pulls her daughter out of the treatment program after a confrontation with the program leaders, and tells her daughter she believes she is all better now, and that she can remove her feeding tube herself.
In the middle of the night, Caroline shows up at Linda’s hotel in a state of mental distress, and asks Linda for help. When Linda tries to take Caroline to the hospital, she gets scared and runs, fleeing down the beach. Linda chases after, but loses her.
Photo: Logan White /© A24 /Courtesy Everett Collection
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ending explained:
Back in the hotel room with her sleeping daughter and the beeping feeding machine, Linda starts to change the fluid bags, but accidentally spills everything. Frustrated, Linda removes the feeding tube out of her sleeping daughter’s stomach on her own. The machine finally stops beeping, and Linda carefully cleans the hole in her daughter’s stomach. As she watches it, the hole appears to pulse and magically close up, starting to heal.
Linda runs from the hotel room, all the way back to her house. There, she finds men is hazmat suits working on the house, and her husband, Charles, who apparently is back from his work trip. When Charles asks about their daughter, Linda lies and says she is with a babysitter. Linda is amazed to find that the hole in the ceiling has magically been fixed—much like the hole in her daughter’s stomach.
When Charles and Linda return to the hotel room, they find James in the room with their daughter. Linda tries to get James to pretend he’s the babysitter, but James refuses to play along. He reveals that the daughter woke up scared and screaming, and bleeding from her stomach. Despite what Linda saw, the hole wasn’t healed.
Charles realizes that Linda took out their daughter’s tube on her own. Linda turns and runs, down to the beach, where she tries, over and over, to drown herself in the ocean. Eventually she swims back to shore, collapses on the beach, and practices the breathing exercises that she always tells her patients to do. She closes her eyes and sees swirls of light, and hears voices, including her daughter calling for her.
When Linda opens her eyes, she sees her daughter leaning over her. For the first time, the audience sees the little girl’s face. Linda promises her daughter she is going to be better. With that, the movie ends.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You meaning explained:
So what does it mean? In an interview with Mashable, writer/director Mary Bronstein explained that one reason we don’t see the daughter’s face until the very end of the movie is because, until that point, Linda didn’t see her daughter as a real person, but only a burden.
“We’re in Linda’s reality the whole time, and she cannot see her daughter as a little girl,” Bronstein said. “She can only see her as something that’s being put upon her, that’s that’s victimizing her, that’s a burden.”
Bronstein added that she also wanted the audience to sympathize with Linda, rather than her daughter. “Then, in a manipulative way, I also know that if you introduce the face of a child into these scenes where Linda is doing the kinds of things that she’s doing, the sympathy is going to go to the child. And I wanted, in a very radical way, for the audience to stay with Linda.”
Similarly, Bronstein said that only hearing Linda’s husband, rather than seeing him (until the end of the movie), represented the distance in the marriage.
And what about the hallucinations that Linda sees in the hole in her ceiling, which trigger her traumatic flashbacks?
Bronstein calls that aspect of the movie “the portal.” In an interview with RogerEbert.com, the filmmaker explained, “For Linda, it’s a scary place. A lot is going on there. There are a lot of voices in there. It’s the part of herself that she can’t run away from. When you have trauma, you can try to put it somewhere, but it’s going to get you. It’s going to keep getting bigger.”
In other words, those voices and dreamy swirls light represent the trauma that Linda can’t outrun—the trauma of that day in the hospital, putting her daughter’s tube in, and perhaps, also, some of her own childhood trauma with her own mother, which the movie hints at, but doesn’t go into.
At it’s core, If I Had Legs is a movie that pushes back on the taboo that mothers might sometimes not want to be a mother, or might want to escape their child.
“There’s this whole bill of sale that women are sold falsely, which is that just because you have a baby, you know how to be a mother, and you know what to do,” Bronstein told RogerEbert.com. “It’s supposed to be your instinct, and you know what to do, and you can just do it from dawn to dusk for the rest of time. Mothers are human beings. My mother was a human being. Your mother is a human being. They had feelings that we didn’t know about, but that was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay. It only becomes not okay if you’re abusing your child, but having thoughts and feelings and expressing them in private is still so scary.”
